


Doppelganger

by mercurybard



Category: Angel: the Series, Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 18:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurybard/pseuds/mercurybard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They go back to the lake</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doppelganger

Sam woke to the sun beaming him right in the eyes. He must have dozed off without putting shades on. Downside to sleeping in the Impala. Straightening, he looked out at the passing scenery. It actually looked familiar…which was mildly disturbing given how much they traveled. "Dude, where are we?"

"Wisconsin," his brother said from the driver's seat.

That's why everything looked so familiar. "We're going back to that lake?"

"Yup."

"What? Is something wrong? Did you see something in the paper?"

"No, nothing's wrong. Can't a guy go visit a couple of old friends without getting the third degree?"

That made Sam sit up straight. "You're actually going back to a town where we did a job, just to visit people? What happened to not having any ties to anyone except family?"

"I just want to see how Lucas is doing. Poor kid went through a lot with the spirit in the lake in all."

"And his mom has nothing to do with this?"

Dean didn't answer.

***

 _'Please don't ring bell between 1 and 4. Baby sleeping.'_

"I wonder if they moved," Dean said, giving the sign another dubious look.

"It's been over a year since we were last here. It's possible Andrea's moved on…"

The door opened, and Andrea Barr smiled out at them. "Hi…can I help you?"

"Hey, Andrea," Dean greeted her, turning on that mega-watt smile. "You look great."

Sam fought the urge to roll his eyes, even though his brother was right—Andrea did look great. She was dressed a little hipper, a little less Mom-casual than she had been the last time, in jeans and a blue tank top that didn't quite meet the waistband of her pants. A quick glance down at her feet revealed that she was wearing heavy-soled biker boots. If she'd had a baby since they were last here, it didn't show.

"Uh…hi," she said, looking from one of them to the other. She was keeping one hand hidden behind the door, Sam realized, and he put his hand on Dean's arm.

Dean saw it too and stiffened. "Listen, Andrea, if this is a bad time, we can come back later."

The woman bit her lower lip, and the three just stood there, staring at one another. Waiting to see who would twitch first. She was holding a weapon, just on the other side of that door, and they both knew it. Sam, personally, wasn't armed. Why should he be? They had just planned on visiting some old friends. But something had changed with Andrea, and he couldn't put his finger on it.

"Dean!" The cry came from inside the house, and before anyone could react, a small, mop-haired boy yanked the door out of his mother's grip and threw himself at Sam's brother. For a brief moment, Andrea's weapon—a crossbow—was exposed, but then she tossed it off to the side. He heard it clatter against the hardwood floor of what he knew, from their last visit, was the dining room.

"Lucas, leave him alone," Andrea ordered her son, who had wrapped his arms around Dean's middle and was hugging him tightly.

"But Fre…Mom, it's Sam and Dean…" Lucas whined.

Dean looked down at him, eyebrows raised. "Hey, little man, what's the word?"

"Zeppelin rules!" He let go of Dean, and Andrea pulled him protectively back against her, keeping a hand on his shoulder.

She shrugged and gave them a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Still trying to figure out what that's all about."

Sam frowned. "Huh." The poor kid hadn't spoken since he watched his father get dragged into the lake and drowned by an evil spirit. When he and Dean had stopped by last, intent on banishing the ghost to the hereafter, Lucas seemed to have formed some sort of psychic connection with the events surrounding the lake. He would draw pictures of people involved, of the homes of those who would be attacked next. In the end, he and Dean hadn't been able to stop the spirit, but when Lucas's grandfather—one of the murderers—offered himself to the lake, it seemed to have been appeased. It'd been Dean who'd taught Lucas about Led Zeppelin.

He wondered if the psychic connection was gone now that Lucas was talking again. Hopefully. Kid had been through enough without having to deal with psychic shit.

Then a baby started crying from inside the house. Andrea looked back over her shoulder and sighed. "All right, come on in. Lucas, get your friends some juice if they want it."

"You guys want cookies? We got Chips Ahoy. Mom, can we have Chips Ahoy?"

"Yes," Andrea yelled back down the stairs, "But you only get two!"

Yes, that was definitely a crossbow laying on the dining room floor. "So, your mom seems to be doing ok."

"Yeah, she got married again," Lucas explained as he led them into the kitchen and dragged a chair over to the counter. Climbing up onto it, he opened the top cupboard and pulled down an unopened package of chocolate chip cookies. Sam and Dean settled at the little table in the breakfast nook. "She got these yesterday but wanted to save them until Wes came home."

"Wes?" Dean asked, "That's your new dad? What's he like?"

"He's cool. Little nerdy, but cool. He and Mom have been doing that ghost hunter thing, like you guys."

Dean made a noise like he was choking on his tongue. "Say what?"

"Lucas!" Andrea had appeared suddenly in the doorway, moving silently despite her heavy boots, a baby cradled in the crook of her arm.

"Mom…" he whined back.

Sam didn't take his eyes off of her. His spider-sense or whatever was tingling as her face went from shocked to hard. This wasn't the face of the woman they'd pulled out of the bathtub a little over a year ago. This was the face of a stranger, scared that Lucas had just betrayed her big secret to two men she didn't know. That's what had been bugging him since the minute Andrea had opened the door. She didn't know them. The tip of her tongue licked nervously over her lower lip, and she fussed with the baby, pulling the lavender cap down farther over its ears.

"We need to talk," he said, giving her a significant look.

Andrea nodded reluctantly.

The baby's name, it turned out, was also Sam, though short for Samantha. Dean just had to make a crack about that. Somehow, Sam had ended up holding baby Sam. She gurgled and tugged on the ends of his hair until he sat her down in his lap, twining his long fingers across her pudgy little belly.

"So you guys know about ghosts and demons and stuff?" Andrea was pacing back and forth behind the couch, hands in the back pockets of her jeans. From time to time, she'd pull them out and start twisting them together until she jammed them back in again.

"Yes and who are you and what did you do to Andrea?" Dean was not sitting down, playing nice. Unlike Sam, he _had_ brought a gun in from car and currently had it trained on Andrea.

The woman stopped her pacing and put a hand to her forehead. "Are you familiar with the idea of an evil twin?"

Sam nodded. "That there's someone out there somewhere who looks exactly like me."

"Only evil," Dean finished for him, "Since we all know my brother's a friggin' Boy Scout."

Andrea sighed. "Sort of. My husband and I came up with this theory that there is only a limited number of possible genetic combinations that can create viable human life. So, from time to time, two people are born with identical DNA, even though they're not even related. Hollywood calls them 'evil twins'."

"So, you're saying you're not Andrea," Dean said slowly, "You're just someone who looks exactly like her."

"No…it gets more complicated than that. You see, my soul was evicted from my body by an ancient demon-goddess. At the exact same time, the woman you knew as Andrea Barr drowned in her bathtub."

Lucas, who was sitting in a recliner in the corner, made a little whimpering noise. The woman-who-wasn't-Andrea reached over and smoothed his hair.

"But that doesn't make any sense! We saved her—Sammy pulled her out of the tub," Dean argued.

She shook her head. "You pulled _me_ out of the tub. Somehow, my spirit and Andrea's crossed on the astral plane. She knew she was dead, and she sensed that I was somehow not." Her hands rubbed over her thin arms. "Do you know what it's like? Being stuck in limbo like that—not able to move on, even though you know you're supposed to. Just trapped." The pleading look she shot first to Dean and then to him just about broke Sam's heart. "It's horrible. Horrible."

Lucas got up and went to wrap his arms around her. "It's okay, Fred. It's okay. You're here; you're safe. Mom wanted you to be here for me, to take care of me since she had to go. You've done really good."

Tears started to leak down the woman's cheeks as she let Lucas pull her down to the floor, still hugging her. Dean sighed and put the gun down on the coffee table. On Sam's lap, the baby made a cooing noise and tugged at her own hair with spit-slick fingers. Everyone just held their peace, letting her cry.

Finally, when the sobbing turning to sniffling, and she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Sorry about that," she said as she climbed back to her feet.

"It's okay," Dean said, a little too quickly. "So, if you moved in when Andrea moved out, why didn't we notice?"

"Memories are chemically encoded in the brain. It took a while for Andrea's to fade. Those first few weeks, everything was all jumbled." When she spoke now, Sam noticed that the trace of accent he'd been hearing was stronger now—it was Texan. She'd stopped hiding it from them. "But with the lake spirit, who would've noticed if I was acting a bit odd? By the time I had all my memories back, you were long gone. Lucas noticed, of course. He's a smart kid." She reached over and ruffled his hair. "Took him a couple of months to come around, but I think we've figured out how to live together. And my Wesley came for me."

"Sammie's father?"

She nodded. "We knew each other back in LA. In my old life—we were hunters too. Been married four months now."

Sam leaned forward. "If you don't mind me asking, what was your name, in your old life?"

"Fred. Winifred Burkle."


End file.
